It feels only right to begin with an apology. Bodies and Being has been quiet for a while now, and that silence has not been intentional. Like so many things in the final stages of a PhD, it has simply… slipped.
Over the past year, life has accelerated in ways I hadn’t entirely anticipated. When I wasn’t able to secure funding to continue my doctoral work, I made the decision—both practical and necessary—to step into full-time work as a secondary school English and humanities teacher. Alongside that, I have been working toward Qualified Teacher Status (QTS), learning how to manage classrooms, plan curricula, and support students through their own formative educational journeys. At the same time, in the background (and often in the foreground), my thesis has remained: demanding, unfinished, and quietly insistent.
Balancing these two worlds has been one of the most significant challenges I’ve faced so far. Teaching is not a job you can do halfway; it requires presence, energy, and emotional investment. PhD writing, particularly in its final stages, demands something similar but different: sustained intellectual focus, the ability to hold an entire project in your mind, and the resilience to keep refining something that already feels complete and yet never quite is. Trying to do both at once has meant that other things—like writing for Bodies and Being—have inevitably fallen by the wayside.
These are, I am realising, the often-unspoken realities of early adulthood in academia and beyond. There is a narrative of linear progression—funding, writing, submission—but for many of us, the path is far less straightforward. New responsibilities emerge, financial realities intervene, and we find ourselves adapting constantly. Plans are made, carefully and optimistically, and then quietly dismantled.
I had one of those plans in August. After months of intense work, I completed a full draft of my thesis. It was, at the time, a moment of immense relief. The document existed; the argument was there. I allowed myself to believe, briefly, that the hardest part might be over.
But, as anyone who has reached this stage will know, a full draft is not an ending—it is an invitation to begin again.
Due to the pressures of academic workloads, my supervisors weren’t able to return feedback until Christmas, when I received comments on two chapters. Even that felt significant after the long wait, but it also marked the beginning of a new phase of revision. Since then, more feedback has come through in the spring, and with it, a suggestion that has reshaped everything: a substantial restructuring of the thesis as a whole.
This is the point where plans unravel. Carefully constructed timelines have had to be rethought, adjusted, and, in some cases, abandoned altogether. The work is no longer just about refinement; it is about reimagining the architecture of the project itself.
There is something both frustrating and, perhaps, necessary about this stage. Frustrating because it demands more time and energy when both already feel in short supply; necessary because it pushes the work toward greater clarity and coherence. Still, it requires a kind of intellectual flexibility that can be difficult to summon when you are also managing the demands of a full-time teaching career.
And yet, despite everything, the work continues.
Bodies and Being was always intended as a space to reflect on the lived experience of research and academic life. Perhaps this moment—messy, nonlinear, and demanding as it is—belongs here as much as any polished piece of scholarship. If nothing else, it is a reminder that behind every finished thesis is a far less tidy process of negotiation, adaptation, and persistence.
So, while I can’t promise perfect consistency in the months ahead, I do hope to return to this space more often. Not with definitive answers, but with reflections from within the process itself.
Bodies and Being 